Thinking

More than one of my family members–the people who raised me, encouraged me to spread my wings, watched me bloom into this magnificent woman that I am–would like for me to just be quiet. They have unfollowed me, disengaged from me, are disappointed in me, afraid of me.

I will not be quiet about my disgust about what is happening in my country right now. I will never be quiet about the ideals I wish my country to uphold. I will never be quiet about demanding respect for the disenfranchised and marginalized.

I will not be quiet. Even if you aren’t reading this anymore.

I will not be quiet.

Bystanders are quiet. Quiet is how genocides happen. Polite is how holocausts happen. Nice is how evil gets in. We fight evil with love, not with nice. For anyone who has been a parent, you know that love does not always mean nice. Tough love. It’s not only hard on the recipient.

You should be outraged about the things our people are doing to others. We destroy each other in so many ways over and over again. We have to stop. We must be better ancestors.

I don’t care if I make you uncomfortable or if you stop following me, or whatever. I will search for every single way to say this until people start to listen. I will not be ashamed for my actions. I do not feel shame to tell every single bit of my truth. I have made the offer before, and I will do it again. Ask me anything. I am an open book. We have to be open to telling the truth to each other. I believe that is our only way forward. I know I am nobody from nowhere, that people don’t know my name yet. Why should you care about my truth? I admit that I am fallible, and making mistakes is normal, but that we must always do our best, for that is when goodness is returned to us.

When I say goodness I do not mean politeness. I do not mean niceness.

I mean honesty, kindness. Fucking dignity. Polite is bullshit. Polite is what got so many of us to think Obama’s being President meant we weren’t racist anymore. Polite is what drove those KKK motherfuckers, those fucking neo-nazis underground so the rest of us could not HATE on them. Instead, they have been infiltrating our system from within. They have had the time and space to redesign their brand to make it more palatable.

Being nice can suck my balls.

If you’re reading this, you have one week to get your ballot in. We must put an end to this nonsense.

Follow black women. Support businesses owned by black women. Invest in them, personally. You say you are too busy and don’t have time to get involved, but would just ”write a check” if you could. Here’s a link. Did you donate?

I know I’m being bold right now, and if you’re reading this, maybe you are nodding in agreement, or maybe you don’t like my tone, but fuck that shit. We women have been too polite, and it costs us too much; We need to speak up and say every. single. Thing. We need to do a better job of educating everyone about their options and make participating in this so-called democracy easy. We are at the place in history when it is time to get America right. WE, The PEOPLE are stronger than The government. The government is broken. I think most of us can agree that neither “SIDE” has it right.

The system is broken.

Don’t be part of it by subscribing to “your party” without thinking about what they really represent, who represents/sponsors them. Choose people who will support democracy, will support your values.

The most fundamental part about being American is WE THE PEOPLE.

THAT’S why we have the 2nd amendment, so we can defend ourselves against our government. Not against our neighbors.

Let’s make sure to raise up the people who are going to be best for each state government and come together to make real changes happen. There are so many ways to support leaders, and now, when we can activate and engage and elect the best leaders for the future of our nation. The future we want our children to be brought up in (not the one our parents were brought up in.)

People want us all to be polite and PC instead of being honest and kind. Fuck that shit. You know what honest and kind leads to? True compromise. Uncorrupted compromise. If we were all honest and kind, (instead of hiding behind being nice and polite) we could actually promote and achieve equity in our society,…….instead we are encouraged by our leaders (in both parties) to to be mean and cruel and evil and unhealthy. They want us to fight with each other. They want us to feel desperate so they can control us with their money and their hidden agenda. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!!! Take our country back from career politicians, white nationalists, from old men.

I believe so much in a better world. I can see it. I daydream about it. I write about it. Yet, when I check in with my body, I realize my shoulders are up next to my ears in stress or my breath is caught in my throat with worry. When I look at the world around me, the society around me, I know that we are a far way from that world of my dreams…when I think about our history, I see that we have changed, but I am not convinced we are better, so maybe it’s just that we are still changing. Still evolving.

It’s like the United States is a person in their late teens/early 20s, someone just beginning therapy, trying to break their bad habits/survival techniques while simultaneously finding new ways to self-sabotage and occasionally relapsing back into some truly terrible behaviors like being a racist, and realizing that they were abused by their uncle (Sam) and might have sort of pushed someone too far by not taking no for an answer soon enough. (Kavanaugh, cough, cough)

I’m a pretty fucking positive person, but I also have some dark/morbid fears about our world. I’m a realist, and my door is cracked open to conspiracies; People are fuuuuuuucked up. I’ve been through some shit, but I don’t let it get me down. I carry on with my head held high. Some say high-horse high, but all the better for them to kiss my ass. I’m tired of being polite. Let’s be real.

I am positive it’s the only way we are going to get over this shit. I could carry on about my ideas to save the world all day, but I’m out there trying to do it instead. Sometimes it doesn’t look how we expect it to, but one thing I’ve learned is to let go of expectations and follow the path. I know my path has been far less difficult than many because I was born a white woman in the U.S. I know most people can’t take time off work to explore their path and recharge after just 8 years of teaching. I worked very hard throughout school and won many generous college scholarships. Because of these awards, as well as need-based assistance, I was able to graduate college with far less debt than most people of my generation. I have no children and no pets (though I really want both!). I don’t own a car, so no car insurance, nor any property, and I live in a small apartment that’s attached to my father’s workshop/garage (he’s a farmer), so my expenses are quite minimal.

After Trump was elected, I fell into a depression. I didn’t think it was really going to happen. I really thought Hillary Clinton would beat him. A fear nestled and an anger hatched inside me that morning. I had moved to Brazil just 4 months before the election, before President Trump happened, and after I got through the sadness and the denial, I got angry, and I wanted to move back to the U.S. to take action. I couldn’t though, because I was there on a two-year contract which I would not break. I made the most of my time there, but I felt very far removed, far away from a great many problems which I wanted to….want to… be a part of solving.

I wanted to be there marching on Jan. 21, 2017. I wanted to attend the Black Lives Matter meetings, the NoDAPL protest, all of it. I wanted everyone to understand how terrible I felt about a country which could elect just a bad man. I don’t care if you don’t like Obama, but you cannot honestly say that he was bad unless you are brainwashed.

He had to be extra good in order to win that seat because no black person could get anywhere in this country with a record like Trump’s.

There was this illusion that the U.S. wasn’t racist anymore. Hooray. And then we turned around and gave the seat back to a bad white man, whose past we would have never forgiven on the transcript of a black man. Black men have been murdered for doing far less disrespectful things to white women than Trump has done to his own daughters and wives.

If you do not support Kaepernick’s stance, you are a coward who would have also probably supported slavery. Punishing a black man for a peaceful protest and calling it protesting disrespect of the flag/soldiers when white people break the flag laws all the time, is downright racist.

Punishing black people or any people of color more harshly for anything a white man does is racism.

Insisting Kavanaugh was just a kid at 17 and shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions but consistently charging black youth as adults for a variety of broken laws, is fucking racism.

I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired of the polite people who have paved the way for the world we live in now. Wake the fuck up. Get engaged. Vote those racist assholes out of office. Take back the House. Speak out to and against the racist and bigoted people in your life. We must stop them.

When was the last time you gave yourself the same amount of time and consideration as you give to things you watch or read on the internet or TV?

I ask you this because of something that happened at my job a couple of months ago. I teach IB Lang. and Lit. at a private international school, though this is an assignment I also used to assign when I taught in public schools in Colorado, and will continue to assign when I return to public school teaching.

I assigned my 11th graders to analyze a poem to find its meaning, a skill they’d been working on for several weeks; each day they met the challenge with a lot of discomfort, as most of us did and still do when staring into the dark, blood-thirsty eyes of a poem. They don’t see how much they’ve improved at thinking critically this year. Although they are totally capable of completing the task, it was challenging, and it was frustrating. So what did they do?

More than a few opened their laptops. But instead of opening their documents of literary terms, steps to take for critical textual analysis, a dictionary, or any of the other thinking tools they are welcome to use– they began looking up interpretations of the poem online.

And while I wryly quipped at them “I Google, therefore I know?” and asked them to put their computers away, it left me thinking about how much easier it is for students to cheat today than ever before, and how I didn’t take full advantage of that “teachable moment” as we like to call it in the education industry.

Never before in history were there so many ethical issues with the technology we had access to. There’s not a lot of damage one can do with a plow, for example….well, not without considerable effort. Same is true of sliced bread. Or a wrist watch. Sure, the printing press made propaganda more prolific, telephones paved the way for prank callers, and we couldn’t have car accidents if it weren’t for cars, but I think we can all agree that these inventions increased production and success, and overall are benchmarks of progress.

However, does progress have a limit? Is it possible to go too far? Is there a point when progress fails us? Or is it just that our progress is somehow clouded by our lack of ethics and morals? Where do we draw the line between being able to do something, and actually doing it?

It seems to me that technology advanced much too quickly, faster than our ethics. Of course there are many good things about all of the information available through the world wide web. Just one example is how women around the world have begun to fight for civil rights since getting a glimpse of how their lives could be if they were allowed to earn an education, to work, to vote, etc. Knowledge is incredibly empowering, but has the pendulum swung too far? Has the overabundance of information (not to mention games and other endless stimuli) become an obstacle to learning, instead of a tool? With the abundance of crappy information out there, it’s even more important to think about what we read, see, hear. To question it and not just accept it.

Did we make a mistake by allowing people access to so much information or was our only mistake in not teaching people how to effectively use the information? If “Knowledge is power”, and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”, did we accidentally unleash doom upon the human race by giving them so much access to knowledge? Of course, if everything on the internet was just unbiased facts and clearly labeled opinions, maybe we would have been able to deal with it more ethically. But since we all know that isn’t the case, I am left to worry. Is having free access to other people’s thoughts causing us to stop thinking for ourselves? Has it made us unwilling to spend the time and energy thinking for ourselves, or are we unable?

Technology and power are really very similar. And just as Eric Liu states about power, technology is not inherently good or bad, either, but people need to learn to manage it and use it responsibly. As much as a person uses technology to do their work (including school work) more efficiently, the more , I believe, he needs to shut it off when he isn’t working. When a person works online, reads online, communicates online, entertains herself online, socializes online, orders food online, and manages her health online, maybe that’s too much online time.

What will it take to make people understand that we are destroying ourselves? What will it take for people to truly see that the most important tool we have is our ability to think, and that we don’t need others to do it for us? That we are hurting ourselves by letting technology do too much for us?

We’ve gotten to a place in this society where people are uncomfortable with being alone with their own thoughts. We’ve been conditioned to believe we need to maintain constant contact with the world and end up forgetting about our planet. We have given away our power by letting others do our thinking for us. Eric Liu, author of “How to get power” and Ted-talk speaker claims that too many people are illiterate in power, (civics, especially). I propose that it goes even further than that: We have become a society illiterate in thinking. The more that “text” has become a part of our lives–the more ideas are placed in front of us–the less we have continued to think. Now, that doesn’t mean I want to go back in time and prevent the invention of the printing press. No, I’m not talking about going backwards, I’m just advocating for more time looking up and looking inward. Don’t believe me? Spend one day–just one 8-hour period–without text. Without a book, without technology, without music, without billboards, without your cell phone. Without any text of any kind. Just you and your thoughts. Explore your ideas. Exercise your thinking. Then come back and tell me if you thought more or less than in a typical day.

Our brain, like a muscle, needs exercise, and we’re not giving it that when we sit in front of the tv or internet thoughtlessly watching videos.

I wonder, did more than a couple of my students even understand my allusion that day when I wryly posed: “I Google, therefore I know?”

Again, I’m not saying that we need to return to the past and stop using the internet. I hope that we continue to have internet for a long time but only if we use it responsibly. I have caught many students plagiarising texts online in my eight years of teaching. And according to a survey posted on plagiarism.org, “One out of three high school students admitted that they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment.” When I asked students recently, after sharing this essay with them, why so many students cheat, they said that it’s because teachers ask too much of them without providing adequate time to complete it, as though the increase to access of information has translated to doing more, faster. I don’t deny that. I have seen it, and I know I’ve been guilty of it, too, when I’m under pressure from the state curriculum to get through so much content in such a short amount of time with students who aren’t reading and writing at grade level. Because students can work at home more easily, we keep asking them to do it more and more (at the high school and college level–there’s actually a trend moving away from assigning any homework at the elementary level), but we aren’t teaching the work habits and ethics necessary to maintain an ethical society. It’s not just happening in school, either; We as a society keep working more and more and never putting down our phones and computers because our bosses are also asking for more from us, despite research that shows “that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand,” according to a study cited by Rutger Bragman in an article on Ted.

Personally, I’ve made some adjustments to my teaching practices since that conversation with my students, but I’m more impassioned now than ever to do whatever I can to change our failing system of education. If you’re unsure why plagiarism is such a big deal, well, let me ask you this: Would you steal money from someone? Money that he worked hard to earn doing something that you are also capable of doing? They don’t say “A penny for your thoughts,” and “a million-dollar idea,” for no reason. Thinking is hard work and people deserve to be recognized for their hard work. It’s the respectful and responsible thing to do. Let’s keep building off of each other’s ideas to keep advancing society. Let’s keep thinking. Let’s take back our power!

The truth is, thinking for yourself isn’t something you have to do too much anymore, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Primary Sidebar

About The Author

Jillian. Jill. Jilly. Jilly Bean. Bean. It helped that I was all legs and full of energy. String Bean, Bouncing Bean. I liked keeping secrets but I loved to spill the beans. Bean Carries On is my garden. A place to cultivate thoughts about the things I care about. I’m a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a teacher, a gardener, a reader, an artist, a cook, and an empath.

Categories

Most Popular Recipes

Get Updates

First NameLast NameE-Mail Address

Footer

About the Author

Jillian. Jill. Jilly. Jilly Bean. Bean. And like a seed in soil, "Bean" stuck. Bean Carries On is my garden. A place to cultivate thoughts about the things I care about. I’m a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a teacher, a gardener, a reader, an artist, a cook, and an empath. I want this to be a place where we can learn together, so please leave comments and if there's anything you want to know, please ask!